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Has anyone had experience using the Pathfinder Kingdom-building rules on play-by-post? I've been told it requires so much discussion among the players to agree on what to do that it needs to be done in realtime chat e.g. via Discord. Does anyone have experience to contradict this?

Since some aspects of the game require adventuring to resolve (e.g. clearing the next hex), I wondered if it made sense to run two sub-games in parallel: one the current adventure, and the other the kingdom-building. There could be a kind of time-warp problem with this, with one side running ahead of the other, but maybe that could be handwaved. Also the adventuring party would have to make sure to be back in the kingdom for appropriate amounts of time each month.

I'm only familiar with the basics of Pathfinder so if I run something like this it would be with certain 3.5 sources plus some homebrew rules (though I do use the PF character sheet because of their combining of 3.5 skills).

The main thing is to never have your party just sitting on their rear waiting for their kingdom to produce resources.

Typically I have a Kingdom produce resources every 3 quests. Treating a "quest" no matter how short or long as "10 days". (So if you're running downtime as well, your downtime would produce 10 days worth of goods after a single quest).

This way the party is never sitting on their rear and is instead playing in the sandbox, always looking for the next side quest to help people and so on.

Also it's most useful to keep track of the kingdom thing via template. I usually designate the ruler as the 'veto' person, and have the 5 players vote on what to build. 3 out of 5 votes passes it. I find what usually happens is, someone suggests something, 2 people back them, then you build it. With the ruler being able to force their hand.

but that's just me, because usually the 'ruler' in my kingdom building games is well.... 'the main character' so to speak. So it might not 100% work for you.

Heh, I wonder if you could have literal kingdom building. Have a group of giants or titans or djinn or whatever come down from the clouds or from a portal or such, and use their mythic strength or incredible magic to personally build a kingdom from the ground up.